How We Train Our Kids to Suffer (And How to Break Free)
We don’t just suffer. We get addicted to our suffering.
Most of us were never taught how to be whole.
We were taught how to behave, how to feel guilty, and how to survive.
Then we wonder why our kids inherit our anxiety, our anger, and our smallness.
It’s a new day, I’m locked in.
Recently I started telling myself, “I’m fresh, I’m rich, I’m vibrant, I’m abundant.”
It was a vision I had for my family. I thought, “We are rich, we are fresh, we are healthy, we are generous.” That’s the standard I wanted for my family, so I had to start working it into myself.
Even when you trip—forget the old self. Rewire the new self.
Goal achievement is a constant relearning process.
How you breathe. How you think. How you learn, wait, respond—the space between stimulus and response. How you adapt. And grow. How you build. How you create. How you earn. How you leverage. How you serve.
These are all things you can directly influence with your mind.
And it all begins with your mind, and your breath. Your state. That’s your base slate.
In order to achieve something, the goal must first take place in the neurons firing in your brain.
That’s where change happens first. It happens inside you, not “out there” somewhere.
Achievement and success are merely byproducts of neurons rewiring and firing in new ways that align with desired outcomes—happiness, deep relationships, high contribution, abundance, vitality, longevity, coherence.
These are all trainable. These are all attainable. They’re all accessible through the synapses running your brain.
Those programs are going 24/7 to create, run, filter, label, and compose your reality.
Most of our programs are just running on autopilot.
We can’t have that anymore if you want to jump into the next level.
If you want to make a leap, you have to do a full file swap—go deep into the mind, erase all the garbage (that is really doing nothing but serving your suffering, suffering we get attached to because it becomes part of our identity), write a new identity program, set new bars, aim for new heights, load new knowledge, and go and run that machine at 198 mph as it was designed to do. Your mind is an F1 car.
Your mind can take you places you never imagined.
Your mind can create whole scenes in your head to argue with another person who isn’t there.
Who made the rule your mind can only create scenes to keep you in the vicious loop of suffering?
Who said your mind has to be addicted to suffering?
Every form of addiction, suffering, and depression can be cured.
But it can be a deep and vulnerable process.
Opening up to life is not easy for everyone. For many, perhaps most, it’s laced with terror from past negative events, trauma, and wounds that have never healed. It can be a hard world.
David Goggins would tell you to just be harder. And yes, this is helpful once you’re on the external grind and things get tough, but we can’t start there. If I just tell the crying child to stop being a little b*h, it really doesn’t do us any good. It’s not a seed. It’s punishment.
And we don’t use pain as punishment to somehow purify the supposedly worthless soul. This is super twisted.
I’m just now uncovering the suffering addictions that many Christian cultures embed into the minds of their children (nothing against Christianity, I love Jesus, but man did we miss the mark on teaching our kids).
We don’t teach our kids to be whole. We teach them to be broken. We don’t teach our kids to be free. We teach them to be constrained. We don’t teach them to love. We teach them to measure. We don’t teach them to give. We teach them to survive. We don’t teach them to heal. We teach them to hold on.
Everything we live in our day‑to‑day lives is what we’re preparing to pass on to our kids.
Sit with that.
Imagine it.
Imagine your kids in front of you now.
Watching you wake up in the morning. Watching you drive. Watching you work. Watching you train. Watching you eat. Watching you sleep. Watching you respond to life.
Are you inspired?
Are they inspired?
If you’re not happy with it, cool. Change it.
The power of the narrative is in your hands.
If you like where you’re headed, great. Keep going.
The infinite game is propelled by consistent wins.
When I bring up “opening up to life,” “healing from trauma,” “it’s not easy,” I’m sure there are a handful of individuals who will take this as full permission to continue replaying the wounded victim experience in their head, living their life out as the one who got the bad hand and deserves better.
I don’t find this limited mindset very helpful. It’s a hubristic method of mixing trauma and potential: “I can do anything, I deserve everything, but this person did X to me, I can’t forgive them, they deserve to pay for my life and make everything right.”
This is absurd pure relativism.
I’m all for infinite possibilities, the power of the internet, the fact that anyone can rise up and win.
I’m all for healing from trauma and caring about the hurt.
However, I’m not throwing out all hierarchies.
I’m not telling you to be a victim here.
I’m not telling you to be a relativist. It’s unhelpful, to say the least.
I’m not discounting the value of immense inner strength and mental discipline. These are valuable components. But they’re not the beginning of healing; they’re the byproduct of it.
Jesus didn’t beat the blind man. He gave him sight.
Somehow in Christian culture, we’ve become addicted to a punitive, constrained ideology where humans are so broken and so dependent and so needy, we keep hurting ourselves, we’re stuck in this state—and they completely miss the whole Jesus bringing “life to the full.”
Anyone that talks about fullness, abundance, healing, manifesting, recovering, potential is a Joel Osteen, Steven Furtick, prosperity‑gospel, blasphemous heretic and deserves to burn in hell.
This is classic black‑and‑white thinking that paints everyone on the outside of your ideology as bad, wrong, unrighteous, “them/they,” etc.. And it doesn’t just apply to Christians; it applies to relativists, oligarchs, and tyrants too.
This is the challenge:
In one way, we’re to be gentle, soft, childlike. Caring for the oppressed. Healing from the past.
On another level, life does get hard. We embrace the challenge that comes around as a sort of purifying—pain can push you into potential and purpose—but this only works if you are coming from a place of true abundance and wholeness.
If you just say, “My suffering is God’s way of improving me”
or “Oh I’m whole, I’m perfect, I’m infinite, but they screwed me so I can’t do X”
both are fucking wrong.
Both perspectives miss the bigger picture.
You have to embrace the full spectrum.
We have the tendency to attach to our traumas.
We get comfortable with the same problems.
We think the problem is who we are, or the problem is who they are, and we leave it there, instead of integrating perception into a whole working framework.
You can keep rehearsing the same wound, or you can start rehearsing a new identity. Pick one. Run it for 30 days. See who you become.
If you’re serious about this, don’t just nod along. Take ten minutes after you read this. Write the old program you’re done with. Write the new one you’re choosing. Then live today as if it’s already installed.
Remember, your mind is ridiculously powerful. Look at history. Look at sports. Look around you. Look within. But look at healing and abundance, not just survival and score‑keeping.
—Dittmar